Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (49 page)

   
“My, he has confided a great deal,” Elise murmured dryly.

   
Olivia smiled wistfully. “He didn’t exactly confide so much as I intuited and pieced and extracted.”

   
“That’s always been the better way of making sense of a man,” Elise replied with a chuckle.

   
The two women chatted and exchanged confidences about Samuel and husbands in general. Elise shared childhood memories of growing up with a troublesome younger brother, and before they realized it, the day was half-spent, past time for the shopping spree Elise had promised Olivia.

* * * *

   
Across town an exchange of confidences of quite another sort took place. At the Parker estate Tish stood in the sitting room of her suite, impatiently tapping her slipper as her stepbrother carefully removed his gloves and tossed them inside the beaver hat he had set on the table after slipping up the backstairs into her quarters undetected.

   
“Where have you been? I waited for you last night...all night alone in that big lonely bed,” she said, her voice softening from petulance to purring, as she gestured at the bedroom door across the small sitting room.

   
“I do have a life of my own to attend, pet,” Richard replied lightly, evading her question as he reached out and ran his pale slender fingers across the swell of her breasts, which were bulging from the top of her low-cut bodice. Only the sheerest wisp of cream lace covered the pinkness of her nipples. He reached inside and tweaked one, then the other, watching her eyes close for an instant, involuntarily.

   
Tish forced her body to obey her mind, stepping quickly away from the hypnotic spell of his touch. “Later, there will be time for that later,” she said breathlessly, still feeling the throb of hunger deep within her as her nipples stung from the rough handling.

   
“How did your interview with Shelby go?” he asked as he poured himself a glass of the expensive sherry Mr. Parker kept on a Lannuier pier table between the windows.

   
“As well as could be expected, I suppose,” she replied guardedly.

   
Bullock studied her, his glittering eyes hooded beneath heavy lids. “He threw your touching offer of a reconciliation back in your face, didn’t he? I told you the whole bloody ruse of faking your death and returning would only enrage him. You should have let me kill him, rather than debase yourself in front of him.”

   
“You tried twice and failed,” she reminded him coldly.

   
Thinking of his unsuccessful attempt the preceding night, Bullock knew he would never admit his third failed attempt to Tish, even if she had agreed to let him kill Shelby. “I will succeed the next time,” he said arrogantly.

   
“You will do nothing. He’s agreed to continue our marriage and to return to Washington with me...but there is one obstacle.”

   
He studied her as she paced. “You mean the St. Etienne girl? She’s quite a beauty. You were scarcely cold in your supposed grave before your beloved husband married her,” he could not resist jibing.

   
Tish turned on him with a furious oath. “She is a nobody, nothing!” she hissed furiously, then calmed, smoothing her hands over the gauzy clinging fabric of her rose pink gown. “I’ve already made plans with Emory Wescott to dispose of her. Once she’s out of the way, Samuel will come to heel quickly enough.”

   
“I beg to differ, my pet. If I know you...and I do, quite well...you’ve blackmailed your noble husband with the chit. If you kill her, you’ll lose whatever tenuous hold you have on him.”

   
This time she came at him with nails bared, but he was ready for her. Seizing her wrists, he twisted her hands behind her back, bending her backward across his arm while his mouth ravaged her exposed breasts, nuzzling them free of their scant confinement, then biting the nipples until she whimpered in a frenzy of pain and excitement.

   
“Ah, Leticia, my beloved, I burn for you. I will eventually burn in all eternity for you, no doubt, but I will have you now,” he rasped as they sank together onto the carpet, their hands greedily tearing at each other’s clothes.

* * * *

   
Not a bad forgery, all in all, Emory Wescott considered, examining the poignantly worded letter to Samuel Shelby for the dozenth time. As Olivia St. Etienne’s guardian, he had ample samples of her handwriting to copy from in concocting the missive. Over the years in trading ventures, Wescott had become adept at forging various bills of lading and payment receipts.

   
“One might even say I have a talent for forgery,” he said chuckling to himself.

   
Now to the matter at hand—the way to lure Olivia out from under the watchdog eyes of Madame Quinn. It was a good thing her husband, that deadly Spanish renegade, had left to parlay with the Osage. Smiling to himself, he thought about the irony. A failure in one area led to success in another. The British failure to incite the Osage against the United States meant nothing to him. When Olivia brought him the Durand fortune, he could say to hell with the whiskey trade forever. Let the English and the Americans all kill one another and the miserable savages in the process! He would live like a king in Queen New Orleans.

   
He folded up the letter and placed it in the envelope he had painstakingly addressed to Shelby in Olivia’s hand. So much for deflecting the troublesome American from following the chit once he had abducted her. Now he had to lure her into his trap. The colonel would be at the Parkers’ gala tonight, an unwilling escort for his wife. Olivia was no doubt repining over that fact. But what if Shelby sent her a note, requesting a tryst after the party? Surely she would slip out of the Quinn house and meet her lover.

   
“I think the racetrack up on the bluffs would call forth some fond memories, Olivia,” he murmured. Certainly the dark, deserted area would be perfect for his plans. He would have her on that keelboat headed to New Orleans within twenty-four hours while Shelby was mourning the loss of his fickle lover. Smiling, he took another piece of paper and began to compose a second forgery…

* * * *

   
Samuel sat in the parlor of his house on Plum Street. A pouch of dispatches from Fort Bellefontaine had been delivered in his absence and sat on the desk in front of him. Looking around the simple room he remembered Olivia’s delighted reaction to it when he had carried her across the threshold the other night. She had been thrilled with everything. Hell, she had been happy in a one-room cabin with Micajah Johnstone. He massaged his temples and closed his eyes, willing away the bittersweet memories of their brief time together. How could their lives have changed so radically in such a few days? Tish alive. Livy not legally his wife.

   
Livy
. No matter what society or the courts might say, she would always be the wife of his heart. At least for the present he could content himself that she was safe with his sister and that Tish had indeed preferred the Parkers’ accommodations to his humble abode. The thought of. traveling all the way back to Washington in such close proximity to that woman was enough to send him to the liquor cabinet to refill his snifter with brandy.

   
“Why not? It’s half-past three in the morning,” he muttered disconsolately. He had spent the past evening in full dress uniform as befitted the husband of Leticia Soames Shelby. Just spending a few hours in her company made him realize how impossible her demands on him were. She wanted him to be a man who never existed, a figment of her imagination, someone who could magically carry her all the way to the White House.

   
Sipping the pungent brandy, he returned to the desk where his reports on Stuart Pardee and his further suspicions regarding Emory Wescott lay, half-written. The verbal accounts he had given in such detail the night of his arrival had to be followed up with a mound of written reports. He had put the chore off for too long.

   
What a glamorous life!
He grimaced, a spy who was more apt to expire from choking on paperwork than die of a gunshot. He opened the dispatch from Washington first, giving it a quick perusal before completing his own task.

   
The news was not heartening. President Madison had. convened Congress early to prepare for war. He scanned the report, glad that he could at least send back a small piece of good news regarding the Osage alliance, especially considering the information in the second dispatch. It had come from Indiana Territory where the young hotheaded governor and militia leader William Henry Harrison had incited the Shawnee to join the British by burning their village at Prophetstown. His forces experienced heavy casualties at a battle on Tippecanoe Creek, resulting in a stalemate which would soon erupt into a full-scale Shawnee uprising once the absent Tecumseh returned to regroup the embittered and undefeated Shawnee and their allies.

   
“The damn fool,” Shelby muttered in disgust, throwing down the papers and running his fingers through his hair. War would soon be here and Tish would be lobbying for him to take a military command on the front lines. “If not for Livy, I might just do it to escape.”

   
He polished off the brandy, then resumed writing his report for Jemmy Madison. He would probably be able, to deliver it in person rather than rely on a courier, he thought glumly. His troubled ruminations were interrupted by a soft insistent rapping on the front door. It was scarcely the hour for social calls. “Who is it?” he asked, reaching for the pistol lying beside him on the desk.

   
At once he recognized his sister’s voice and rushed to throw open the door. Elise slipped inside, shivering from the cold damp mist that had enveloped the city, bringing a taste of winter. “What’s happened?” he asked, knowing it must bode ill indeed for her to be out at this hour.

   
“Olivia’s gone,” she said urgently as her eyes swept around the parlor and then returned to meet his. “I had hoped she’d come to you but I see she hasn’t.”

   
“What do you mean, gone! Has she been kidnapped from your house?”

   
“No. She rode away alone. I saw her slip out from the stable behind the house.”

   
“But where would she go in the middle of the night?”

   
Elise betrayed some agitation now. “I don’t know. It was quite accidental that I saw her leave. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known she was gone until morning. Orlena’s kitten wandered away from her room and she awakened me crying for it. I searched the house and just happened to be passing the kitchen window when I saw someone open the stable door. By the time I got to the backyard it was too late to stop her. I don’t think she even heard me call her name.”

   
Samuel’s expression hardened. “This smells like some sort of trap.”

   
“That’s what I fear, too. It has to be Wescott, but .how did he get her to come to him?” she asked, as much of herself as of him.

   
“I don’t know but I’m sure as hell going to find out,” he said, strapping on his sidearm and then reaching for the Bartlett rifle hanging on the wall above his desk. He turned at the door and added, “Stay here, Liza—just in case she turns up. I’ll be back as soon as I learn anything.”

   
She nodded. “I’ll send Justus back to tell the children’s nurse where I am.”

* * * *

   
Dawn came quickly, gray and sullen, as if forecasting bad news. Elise had a pot of coffee bubbling on the hearth when the sound of hoofbeats broke the early morning stillness. Rushing to the front door, she was disappointed to find that it was not Samuel or Olivia but rather a young boy, fourteen or fifteen, thin with stringy tan hair and freckles. He carried a sealed envelope.

   
“I’m looking for a Colonel Shelby,” he said in a soft drawl.

   
“I am his sister, Madame Elise Quinn. You may leave it with me,” she said, turning to open her reticule and pull out a piece of silver. The youth looked dubious, but when she handed him the silver coin, he smiled. “Who gave you this letter to deliver?” She held another coin in her open palm.

   
“A lady like yoreself, m’am. Real pretty she was.”

   
“What did she look like?”

   
“Like I said, pretty, finely dressed. Oh, she had red hair. Real red hair.”

   
“Where did she find you?”

   
“At the Owl and Bear late last night. She said I was to get it to the colonel this morning.”

   
“Was anyone with her?”

   
He nodded. “There was a fellow—an older gent with her. But it was the lady what give me my orders.”

   
“This older gentleman, describe him.”

   
By this time the boy was growing restive under her terse inquisition. He eyed the coin with longing but started to back off the porch, as if afraid he had blundered into something in which he did not want to be involved.
   
‘‘He...he was kinda big, stocky with thick gray hair. Dressed real good just like the lady. I thought he was her father.”